I am (moderately, not really) scandalized to discover recently that a handful of iconic, high-rotation recipes that I’ve been eating for my entire life are not family standards passed down from generation to generation. Instead, they came from the 1980 edition of the First Presbyterian Church of Conroe cookbook, titled Breaking Bread. That’s the church my Granny, Bettye Wakefield, took me to for several years.
What my mom, Andrea Durrett, remembers about the 1980 edition of this book is that it was partly inspired by a man in the church who was a great baker, and held some cooking classes that Granny and Grand Duke (John, my grandfather) went to. It’s a pretty solid, if of its time, collection of recipes, bound with a binding comb. Granny gave her a copy, and one to her sister and my aunt, Susan Eckis. “When I’m looking for a chicken recipe, I’ll pick up several cookbooks and I always pick up Baking Bread,” my mom says. “It used to be the Joy of Cooking — Mother gave it to me when I was in my 20s, but it’s like an encyclopedia. It’s good for general ideas, but at the time was way too technical for me.”
We were not a mother/daughter duo who cooked together. I was uninterested, and she wasn’t about making me help in the kitchen before meals. I did earn a $5 a week allowance for doing the dishes, and I hated every minute of it. I didn’t get interested in cooking until I bought my own house nearly a decade ago and started hosting my family for holidays. I’ve pushed away from a lot of our traditional dishes, other than cornbread dressing, because that would cause a riot.